One of the better perks of a Thanksgiving Break in Massachusetts is visiting Plimoth Plantation. For a mere $28, one can visit stunningly accurate recreations of the Mayflower, an English village as constituted in 1627 and a host of other historically important sites.
Not only is the plantation precisely modeled after historical texts, but so are the B-list colonial actors. At a cost significantly less than a day of tuition at Duke, you can treat yourself to hours of recreated history and unintentional comedy. Plimoth Plantation is the physical manifestation of William Faulkner’s insistence that, “The past is not even past.” Although, I might add, the gravity of Faulkner’s words do not seem entirely appropriate in describing a cutesy exhibition frequented mostly by parents with young children.
In Faulkner’s work, the inescapability of time past often creates a grounds for conflict and suffering rather than a souvenir shop. The history Faulkner gravitates toward is necessarily consequential, while the history of Plimoth Plantation is more just intellectually curious. In the Faulknerian world, and, it too often seems, the real word, the past is anything but benign. The acceptance of reality necessarily is the acceptance that history is a heavy burden, the weight of which can exact far more than a $28 entrance fee from unsuspecting victims.
Indeed, where history is involved, often billions are at stake. The last decade says as much. Consider the three highest impact natural/human created disasters of the last 10 years: 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and As-Yet-Unnamed Epic Recession. Countless billions will work towards alleviating the reverberations from the cruel past into the infinite expanse of time. This decade-old past, unlike the one played out from March to November in Plimoth, is in no way clearly defined.
With regard to the three aforementioned disasters, the past isn’t even the past in part because the past is not static. Every week seems to bring new revelations in the trifecta of horror. In an eerie convergence of past and present, on Nov. 13 Attorney General Eric Holder announced that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators would stand trial in a Manhattan federal courtroom, as opposed to a traditional trial by military commission. Six days later the North American Aerospace Defense Command declared an official reassessment of air defenses instituted in response to 9/11, citing the costliness of current measures of counter-terrorism.
Clearly, nine years after the fact, Sept. 11 is still very much a present event with judicial and military implications. The disaster cannot be neatly historicized in the manner of, say, Thanksgiving.
Nor can Hurricane Katrina. The causes of the massive damages sustained by New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish are still being fiercely debated in academic and now legal settings. At the heart of the debate this past week was a successful lawsuit accusing the Army Corp of Engineers of improper maintenance of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (better known as the “Mister Go” canal), a channel spanning 76 miles originally built to increase trade. The litigators won $716, 698 from the U.S. and the Army Corp of Engineers when U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval ruled that Mister Go ultimately helped direct floodwaters into New Orleans, a funneling effect that was realized as early as 1988. Duval wrote in his 156-page opinion: “It [the Army Corp] knew that indeed all of the engineering blunders that it had made now put the Parish of St. Bernard at risk.”
The federal government had previously avoided such lawsuits via The Flood Control Act of 1928, which grants it immunity against damages resulting from failures of flood control. Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, Mister Go acted a navigation canal rather than a flood control measure. Obama and co. now are liable for billions in damages. To what extent history will classify Katrina as a man made disaster?
Unlike Katrina, we know for a fact that Great Depression II was an entirely man-made disaster, but, in the same vein as 9/11 and Katrina, is not subject to historicizing because of myriad legal and policy-oriented question marks. The last year has easily seen thousands of “who is responsible?” and “how do we respond?” pieces in major publications, with enough conflicting ideas and opinionated self-serving B.S. (I may have just unwittingly summed up the RGAC controversy) to fuel several seasons of “The Real World.” The current issues at stake for all three disasters in their respective aftershocks are not so different: The difficulty of finding who is responsible for Disaster X, the ordeal of punishing the responsible and the ensuing headache of preventing it from occurring again.
The guys who invented Plimoth Plantation never really had to deal with these questions, probably because the Pilgrims landed on Plymoth Rock nearly four centuries ago, made nice with the Indians and then ate turkey. Not exactly a disaster. No faulty security measures, no litigation, no government negligence. This past, at face value, is not that past.
Dig deeper though, and it appears even Plimoth Plantation must reconcile its existence with modernity: Thanksgiving 2009 could be jeopardized by an alarming Pumpkin pie shortage. Cue Faulkner.
Ben Brostoff is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every other Tuesday.
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